Benefits of physical health to your mental health

Growing up, I was never really into sports. I only participated when I had to (mainly P.E. in school, something I think a number of us didn’t love). However, when I first started experiencing anxiety attacks, the only thing that would get me through it was walking around. The whole fight or flight thing made sure that I had to be moving in order to get through it.

As I started to get a handle on my anxiety, I started noticing different patterns of what things would make me more anxious and what things would make it worse. Caffeine for example within a couple of years became a solid no. Not only would it make me incredibly anxious, but it ended up making me unwell too. What I did notice was that on any days I was feeling under the weather, I would feel more anxious.

Naturally, I had many attempts at getting fit after leaving school. We all want a healthy lifestyle but figuring it out as a new adult can be challenging if you don’t already have good habits in place. As I got a little bit fitter, I noticed that I wasn’t experiencing such high levels of anxiety. Unfortunately, I didn’t stick with the good habits and my anxiety got worse again. That’s when I finally accepted the correlation.

Our physical health and mental health are so intricately intertwined that in order to improve one, you need to improve the other. They aren’t separate entities. They amount to our ‘health’. Over the years, I’ve tried finding ways of getting healthier in a way that’s not too difficult to implement and here are my recommendations:

1. Get outside for at least 20 minutes a day. Being cooped up inside isn’t good for our health and getting outside means better oxygen and likely a little bit of exercise as well as some Vitamin D.

2. Plan light foods. Diet is often the trickiest but if you can find the bare bones of a meal that is something that works for you, you can eat that little bit better rather than having heavy meals. I personally like the idea of having two or three options for each mealtime and deciding what takes my fancy at the time. Say for breakfast you could have toast, cereal or oats. For lunch, you could have a sandwich, salad or burger. For dinner, you could have pasta, meat and veg or bake something frozen.

3. Plan activities with friends. Rather than going for a meal, plan something you could do like crazy golf, or tree top adventures. Whatever you guys prefer.

4. Take up a hobby. I like horse riding so that was my favourite way to exercise during the week, although it can get pretty expensive. For me, it was the perfect way to do something I enjoy, be outside, be around people and get that little bit fitter. (See, tackling both mental health and physical health in one activity!)

We get more anxious when we aren’t healthy because our brain is aware we are more vulnerable so it’s on the lookout for more dangers, in theory giving you a better chance at survival. As we know though, anxiety is just triggered by life-threatening situations anymore, it’s triggered by the stuff that stresses us out. By focusing a bit on our physical health, we are trying to be at 100% (which obviously we can’t be at all the time, but that can be our aim). When we feel better physically, we feel better mentally.